Category: Emma

We seem to be *mostly* through this stage of sleep regression. (Fingers crossed!) We are back to one or two wake ups a night. I think it will be a long while before we are back to sleeping through the night.

Every night, we do dinner, followed by some chill out time, followed by a bath, and then cuddles and a song before bedtime.

However Emma often has other ideas, and instead of trying to hold her down to dry, moisturise and dress her, we go with her flow, which is, mainly, jumping and screeching.

Trying to hold her down and dry and dress her just results in crying, screaming and her getting hot and red and sweaty. Doing this her way, she’s happy, she smiles and doesn’t get hot and sweaty or stressed, and it makes going to sleep much easier.

Emma’s first birthday is 9 weeks away.
I don’t know where the time has gone, it seems like only yesterday I was cuddling my sweet newborn baby. How is she almost a year old?!

I’ve never had to plan a child’s party before. Although I have been to loads of them, most of them have been in people’s homes. For us that’s not an option. Our home is a small one bedroom apartment, just enough room for the three of us. The idea of having all my friends and family (almost 70 people) trying to squeeze in to our home at the same time gives me a headache.

Finding an appropriate venue for a child’s first birthday that doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount of money was hard.
Some places wanted to charge £75 an hour, plus £15 per person for food with a minimum of 25 people! Ummmm, no.

So when I found that a local daycare nursery hires out for birthday parties, I was all YAY!!! For £150 we get the staff, the entire daycare nursery, the kitchen, all the toys etc. All we’d need to do is a small child friendly buffet.
Simples and inexpensive (ish)

We picked a theme (Waybuloo) as it’s Emma’s favourite tv show.

So we have some Waybuloo invites, some party bags, and well, apparently Waybuloo party ware is discontinued…. because that’s all we could get. So I’m having to be very creative with the rest.

So I decided to pick coloured plates to match the Piplings, and coloured napkins and cups too. Pink ones, blue ones, orange ones and lilac ones.

The only other themed item is the cake. Which is being specially designed by Lily-Belles Bakery based in Twickenham.

All we have to do is write and post the invitations, fill the party bags and make the food and have a party!

In 9 weeks time, I’ll have a one year old and will have pulled off our first birthday party.

It seems we are going through a period of sleep regression. It is HARD.

Little Duck wakes anywhere from 2 to 7 times a night. Which means that either one or both of us are having to get up to comfort/change/give milk.

We are at 9 months, which is a typical age for a growth spurt, so kiddo is eating a lot of food, and recently starting having 2 naps a day, each lasting a minimum of an hour and a maximum of an hour 45. Normally she has two 30 minute naps!

The constant night time wakes and broken sleep means that by 9:30 am, she is yawning and by 10am she looks tired and has tiny bags under her eyes.

Add all of that, along with drugs that make me tired and when I do sleep make me have very strange lifelike dreams, it’s really hard.

The Husband is off for the next two days, so I might be able to catch up on some shut eye.

I’m hoping this sleep regression goes away soon. Seriously, she wasn’t this bad when she was a newborn! I’m trying to get back on track so I can go back to work, so I will need sleep to function.

Oh, and we have another tooth sprouting. So we have the occasional whiny moment.

We have started the path to solid foods for Little Duck (who is 24 weeks old this Wednesday… HOLD ME!!)

We started with sweet potatoes, raspberries and avocados.
It was pretty hit and miss. Although they say you should try babies with a food 6 or 7 times before you dismiss it as “my baby doesn’t like …”

So we’ve had sweet potatoes again and it was pretty good. We were going to try avocado again, but The Husband ate the avocado. And raspberries, well I think we will hold off a bit longer on those. We’ve also had banana, but Little Duck doesn’t seem to care for them.

This week we are trying soft carrot, broccoli and some soft boiled potatoes.